I woke up this morning feeling hazy and anxious, which is not atypical after staying up late. I was in the city last night with my housemates at a play, and the night activities lingered over to a chic yet quirky bar afterward. By the time Sarah and I made the long drive home to my cat, my bed, it was past midnight.
When I wake up anxious, it usually means I have to pee, but instead of going pee I poked my phone. The screen turned bright and I checked my email, which for anyone reading, is a terrible thing to do first thing in the morning. I don’t get email notifications, but I do compulsively check my email on my phone the way I used to constantly refresh Instagram, Facebook, Myspace. The tools have changed but the action remains the same. I opened up a Substack newsletter from
, who writes essays and sends out links which are usually interesting reads and a great source of distraction and entertainment if I am feeling discomfort. I am aware that distraction via my phone is not a healthy coping mechanism for feeling morning anxiety, but here we were.I clicked on several of the links. There was one about the representation of women alcoholics in film and media. There was one about an influencer who quit influencing (?) to get a 9-5 job, which I couldn’t read because of a New York Times paywall. I stopped paying for the New York Times sometime after the election and before the war in Ukraine and usually I don’t miss it. I clicked on another link which brought me to a heartfelt manifesto from an artist who decided to stop fucking around and focus on her work. I won’t link any of it here, because it it’s not important that you know who she is or the details of the work (she draws and writes and collages, has followers, sometimes is so immersed in the creative process that she doesn’t leave her studio for hours at a time); what matters is that it made me feel terrible about myself.
This phenomenon, the sinking feeling that comes when I see artists diligently making work and sharing it, is not uncommon for me to experience on the internet. When I think it might be coming— someone’s portfolio website, literally any Instagram account, a video of a creative process, I have the inclination to flinch and close the window, look away. I don’t want to see someone doing something successfully (“successfully”?) that I oftentimes feel like I can’t muster the will to do at all. If I look, it is a doorway to a well of shame.
In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes that this experience of feeling shame when we see other artists’ work only comes up when we are not making our own work, not putting in the time on the projects that call to be made by our hands and minds. In bed this morning, squinting at this other artist’s hard work and ecstatic joy for her own experience of creation, I knew in my heart that Julia Cameron is right.
I have not been making work this year that I could line up on my bedroom carpet or about which I feel a sense of abundance. The acts of expression and creativity that I have worked on this year, and for the past few years, have been on the evenings and weekends of my life. Since January, I have called a few square dances, cooked dinners of farm-grown vegetables, fermented some jars and crocks, sewed 2 pairs of underwear, reprinted stickers I already drew. I learned a new tune on the banjo the other day. I applied to and was rejected from an MFA program. But mostly, above all other activities, I have worked at my job.
Do you have a job? It’s the first question that comes to mind when I feel that hot, weird, envious rage around people on the internet. Is this your job? I have a job. It takes eight hours of my brain and bodily powers for five days out of the week. Did you used to have a job? Did you leave it? Do you work for yourself? Are you married to someone who financially supports you? Do you have a secret skill, like coding software, that you do for six hours per week and it pays all your bills? Is that how you can devote so much time to this?
These are ugly, prying questions but I am obsessed with them because I have a job and it takes up a lot of my time. In Holly Whitaker’s newsletter, which was the instigator this whole cascade of thoughts this morning1, she writes about spending two months out of every year wandering around Italy and Greece eating pannacotta. The questions emerge.
Trying to be an artist and have a full time job and struggling with time and balance is not a struggle unique to me. If we are people who feel deeply that we must make creative expressions and release them into the world, we have probably also bumped up against the walls of capitalism where we must work in order to live. My strange conundrum with this is that I am not out here trying to quit my day job. Most of the time, I enjoy it.
In the native plant garden at work, we found a Western fence lizard. Abby picked it up and gave it to Rochelle and we watched quietly as it crawled over her hands and onto her sleeve. It reminded me of another teenage girl who had come to the farm with her long, immaculate, acrylic nails and milked a goat. She had been just as adept as Rochelle. She outstretched her fingers straight as she milked, crimping and tugging on the hairy, pimpled teat, slowly and synchronized, understanding milk.
I work for a small nonprofit farm where kids, mostly teenagers, from nearby cities come to learn about the food system and organic agriculture. I do lots of things for the nonprofit, sometimes teaching about native plants and ecosystems, sometimes designing documents for donors to see, sometimes cooking in the kitchen. It’s diversified. I get to be outside. It feels sometimes like it feeds my art just as much as it takes away my time. The video at the top of this essay is from the other day, one of the many times I freed a yearling goat from the fence on my walk home from work.
Living close enough to work to walk there is more than most can ask for. I have my own yurt office. Most days I get fed a hot lunch cooked from food grown on the farm; I teach a ten-year-old about eating acorns; I make goat milk yogurt with whichever girls are interested.
And YET and YET a full time job feels like too much of my time. I love it, and I need to make a plan to go or I need a four day work week or something. There’s no way I can do this job and be the kind of artist I want to be (studio time that’s not just evenings and weekends, more freedom to travel, more freedom in general). I want to reach through the internet and all-caps at everyone who sparks my envy: DO YOU HAVE A JOB? NO? HOW?
Onward, into the future: This relates to how terrified about having a child, because something will have to go. How can I work a job, this job, any job and be an artist and a mother? I was raised by a working mother who gave up being an artist for a while to be able to do only two things really well. I am so afraid of what I will have to give up when it already feels like I am giving up so much.
Sometimes I write essays like this to get to the heart of a question, no matter how ugly or awkward it is. And along the way of writing the heart of the question, I come up with something like ideas that could grow toward answers.
My housemate Hope is a firm believer in a policy of moving closer when someone makes you uncomfortable or annoyed. Don’t like your coworker? Find something in common with them. Be vulnerable and see what happens. Dissolve the rubbery wall of rage they spark in you by moving toward connection. Maybe there’s something to this with artists on the internet. Feel envious of someone’s creative practice? Do an informational interview. Find out if they have a job, a kid, a trust fund. How do they make it work? Do they get up at 5am to write? I so often find myself constructing narratives about people on the internet, especially those that spur the flinch away. Be curious about the truth and possibility present in it.
The other idea that could grow toward an answer is to do the work. Feel envious of someone’s creative practice? Put down the phone and pick up your journal. Write out the feelings for three whole pages, and if there’s more left over, grab the cat. Pet him furiously until he squirms away. Get up out of bed and have a little cup of coffee and some of the raspberry pastry leftover from Hope’s birthday. Put on whatever shoes are by the door and start walking out, around the bend in the road and up the hill. The dog will follow you. Go past the flowering mustard and turn right up the washed out trail before Scot and Niki’s house. The grass is getting tall, so avoid those patches and remember to check for ticks later. Continue until the always arching oak tree and call for the dog to follow you off to the right, the way you don’t always go. Pull a tiny acacia sprout along the trail. Past the eucalyptus there is a big, flat deck that overlooks the ocean. Take off your shoes and stand on the deck. Bend forward and let your torso drape over your legs like a ragdoll. Stretch back up again and down a few more times. Downward dog. Butterfly. Knockin’ on heaven’s door. Freak out with gratitude about being able to look at the ocean from your backyard, for the little white dog who is loyal to you, for the knowledge that acacia is invasive, for the familiarity with which you walk these woods. When the dog is ready to go, follow her back down to the house. Have a little more coffee and greet your housemates who are also sleepy from the late night out in the city. Go into your bedroom and close the door. Pat the cat again. Dig out your laptop. Wrest your head out from between the fenceposts and begin to write.
I read this newsletter all the time. She is smart, eloquent, and has so much to say about addiction/the internet/ our world. I also love being recommended media through links, even when it brings up all kinds of feelings.
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